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cousin_it comments on Best career models for doing research? - Less Wrong
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From my point of view, and as I discussed in the post (this discussion got banned with the rest, although it's not exactly on that topic), the problem here is the notion of "blackmail". I don't know how to formally distinguish that from any other kind of bargaining, and the way in which Roko's post could be wrong that I remember required this distinction to be made (it could be wrong in other ways, but that I didn't notice at the time and don't care to revisit).
(The actual content edited out and posted as a top-level post.)
(I seem to have a talent for writing stuff, then deleting it, and then getting interesting replies. Okay. Let it stay as a little inference exercise for onlookers! And please nobody think that my comment contained interesting secret stuff; it was just a dumb question to Eliezer that I deleted myself, because I figured out on my own what his answer would be.)
Thanks for verbalizing the problems with "blackmail". I've been thinking about these issues in the exact same way, but made no progress and never cared enough to write it up.
Perhaps the reason you are having trouble coming up with a satisfactory characterization of blackmail is that you want a definition with the consequence that it is rational to resist blackmail and therefore not rational to engage in blackmail.
Pleasant though this might be, I fear the universe is not so accomodating.
Elsewhere VN asks how to unpack the notion of a status-quo, and tries to characterize blackmail as a threat which forces the recipient to accept less utility than she would have received in the status quo. I don't see any reason in game theory why such threats should be treated any differently than other threats. But it is easy enough to define the 'status-quo'.
The status quo is the solution to a modified game - modified in such a way that the time between moves increases toward infinity and the current significance of those future moves (be they retaliations or compensations) is discounted toward zero. A player who lives in the present and doesn't respond to delayed gratification or delayed punishment is pretty much immune to threats (and to promises).